VRChat: Free models are a problem?

A friend of mine are really in to VRChat and somwtimes he infects me with his unbridled glee about that game.

I have tried to make some assets for it, but nothing got close to being close to done, except for a handful of assets here and there. And those few assets were mostly… bad. Not anything I could be prod of at least.

Anyways, this frind of mine really liked a certain pair of shorts/underpants. but since they where free from some 3D model store place they are not really well optimized. I think he mentioned that they were made to work with MMD stuff.

Nonetheless, being the good friend I amm I took it upon myself to look into making them a bit more… VRChat friendly. These shorts had like 3 major problems.

Looks somewhat okay I guess.
  1. A lot of polygons.
  2. A lot of unnecessary faces.
  3. It was not a unified mesh.
Oh my god, the horror. That is a lot of triangles
Umm… what the hell?

Wanting to look at the UV map revealed that all the UV polygons where not connected. Strange, but okay. Imagine my confusion when I tried to sew it together and it did not work. At first I just thought that it was Maya being Maya. But no, all those polygons where not connected. It was not a unified mesh. How and why someone would do this is beyond me.

After merging everything in to one mesh. Smoothing it out it was time to make the newer and nicer mesh.

Low poly mesh woohoo.

And with a crapy lowpoly mesh it was time for baking over color and normals.

Low-poly vs Hi-poly

Color was fine, but the normals where a bit whack. so I omitted them. But it looked fine anyways. I even reduced the texture size from 1024 down to 512. You can see the decline in crispiness but it should not really be that noticeable in-game. I could improve it more but… naa. If my friend is happy with it then that is that.

Well, praise me, better performance for all in VRChat.